Winter Print Show @ North House Gallery, Manningtree, Essex 1 December 2012 – 19 January 2013Black Light: Eclipse, exhibited at North House Gallery, include two series, each of nine prints in editions of ten (30x24cm / 66x54cm), Giclee printed on 300gsm Somerset paper. The sequence of photographic prints traces the moon crossing the disc of the sun during an annular solar eclipse. The images were taken on 20 May 2012, 17:31pm to 8:38pm, at the McMath-Pierce solar telescope on Kitt Peak while I was artist-in-residence at NOAO (National Optical Astronomy Observatory), Arizona, USA.

Artist-in-Residence at CTIO, La Serena and Cerro Tololo, Chile 5 – 27 November 2012The residency at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) headquarters in La Serena and observatories in the Andes followed the equally awe-inspiring Kitt Peak and Tucson experience in May (view The Blackest Black post ). Here, most of my observing was with the naked eye or digital camera under the immense starry southern hemisphere skies, highlighted one night by the dramatic Leonid meteors that split the sky with lines of light. The residency coincided with CTIO’s 50th Anniversary event and launch of the remarkable Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the mountain. It was incredible to witness the first images coming from the DECam, the world’s most powerful digital camera, which is undertaking the largest survey of the southern skies to record information from millions of galaxies, billions of light years away, in the hunt for dark energy. The observing and the discussions with scientists and engineers on both residences have had a radical impact on my art practice and my way of ‘seeing’ the world. To view further information and images Click:www.janegrisewood.com

Black Light reflects on the experience of observing and photographing the annular solar eclipse on 20 May 2012 at the McMath-Pierce solar telescope while artist-in-residence at Kitt Peak and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Arizona, USA.30 pages; concertina format; 15 x 11 cm folded /15 x 165 cm unfolded; sequence of 11 photographs with time taken; edition of 30; produced by Book Works, London

Artist-in-Residence at NOAO/KPNO, Tucson and Kitt Peak, Arizona, USA28 April – 30 May 2012In May 2012, photographer Judy Goldhill and I were invited to work for a month as the first artists-in-residence at the headquarters of US NOAO (National Optical Astronomy Observatory) and at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in the Tohono O’odham lands in southern Arizona. Night after night, observing the vast clear skies through the powerful telescopes in the observatories felt like being in a time machine seeing into the past – unimaginably distant objects billions of light years away. The phenomenal encounters were intensified further by ‘observing the observers’ in the control rooms throughout the night. The environment became ideal for my ongoing research into darkness, intense blackness, the ‘blackest black’. Defined by its absence of light, black paradoxically enables us to see light. The light from celestial objects and the information gleaned from the telescopes would not be possible without the blackness of night. During the residency, I became increasingly conscious of the significance and implications of ‘seeing’ in the dark, and it became an apt metaphor for my experiences. I am making artworks in a variety of media that might reflect this dark/light, visible/invisible continually shifting cosmological temporality. Focusing on my explorations, the project is continuing with a forthcoming residency in November (View The Region of the Stars post) in the observatories in Chile. View also Where Art & Astronomy Meet post.

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'If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then (s)he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein 1922